About

The U.S. Data Federation will support government-wide data standardization and data federation initiatives across both Federal agencies and local governments. This is intended to be a fundamental coordinating mechanism for a more open and interconnected digital government by profiling and supporting use-cases that demonstrate unified and coherent data architectures across disparate government agencies. These examples will highlight emerging data standards and API initiatives across all levels of government, convey the level of maturity for each effort, and facilitate greater participation by government agencies. Initiatives that may be profiled within the U.S. Data Federation include Open311, DOT’s National Transit Map, the Project Open Data metadata schema, Contact USA, and the Police Data Initiative. As part of the U.S. Data Federation, GSA will also pilot the development of reusable components needed for a successful data federation strategy including schema documentation tools, schema validation tools, and automated data aggregation and normalization capabilities. The U.S. Data Federation will provide more sophisticated and seamless opportunities on the foundation of U.S. open data initiatives by allowing the public to more easily do comparative data analysis across government bodies and create applications that work across multiple government agencies.

Background

The concepts of data federation, aggregation, harmonization, and curation have a long history in the geospatial data community with the National Geospatial Data Assets and OMB Circular A-16 Supplemental Guidance, but the 2013 Federal Data Policy, “Managing Information as an Asset,” substantially helped these ideas spread across Federal agencies and even local governments. The policy transformed a centralized process for inventorying, releasing, and documenting data into a decentralized, but standardized, process for managing all data assets from within the source agencies. With leadership from OMB and GSA and collaboration between the public and Federal agencies the Project Open Data website documented a process and a standardized metadata schema that everyone could follow and Data.gov built tools and infrastructure to support the process with metadata generators, validators, dashboards, and the Data.gov catalog itself to aggregate this standardized metadata across the myriad disparate sources - not only Federal agencies, but also state and local governments.

This same federated approach was then repeated with OMB’s FITARA guidance which reused some of the same tools and infrastructure developed for Project Open Data. Now the emerging Open Source Policy from OMB is preparing to take the same approach yet again. GSA and OMB have also been involved with similar work to develop financial data standards as part of the DATA Act.

Even where there isn’t an explicit policy, White House initiatives have increasingly been aimed at curating and coalescing specific datasets from across the country. The most recent efforts include The Police Data Initiative, The Opportunity Project, The Voting Information Project, and the Civic Data Project. Additionally, some agencies are working on data federation as a dependency for a policy even where the policy isn’t explicit about data management. This is the case with the National Address Database project DOT is coordinating with state and local governments to achieve the mandate of Next Generation 911 services. Many of these projects are included in the 3rd U.S. National Action Plan (NAP) for Open Government, but there are even more commitments in the NAP that will rely on implementing this federated approach including the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, Open311, and the Machine Readable Government Organizational Chart. Another NAP commitment covers access to personal data and the needs of the My Data efforts are broadly applicable here as well.

The U.S. Data Federation website will catalog these initiatives and provide a dashboard indicating the maturity and scale of implementation for each one. The Federation Toolkit will package the reusable components needed for a successful data federation strategy. As a pilot this effort is beginning with a basic website and a discovery sprint to start developing a toolkit. The website will evolve to highlight federation efforts, document how to participate in each one, and track their development status. Ultimately the website will cover the whole lifecycle of data federation. For example:

The earliest stage of federation is usually a simple matter of curation. The U.S. Data Federation website will allow for this simple curation when no other website is available to do so, but where websites already exist it will point to those curated lists. It will also provide basic stats about the state of curation and indicate the canonical tag that can be used by metadata publishers to curate the data into these collections at the source. As the tag is included in metadata syndicated to Data.gov, the Data.gov catalog will be able to facilitate this aggregated view in a more sustainable way than manual after-the-fact curation.

More mature federation incorporates a data standard. The U.S. Data Federation website would indicate the data standard that exists and provide dashboards to track how many agencies or government bodies have published the data using the standard. Where no standard exists, the website would document the policy and best practices for standards development.

As we’ve seen demonstrated by the powerful impact of the internet and the web, a seamless user experience is possible within a decentralized system, but it requires us to work together and take standardization seriously. Let’s start getting more organized about how we can apply these deeply American principles to our digital government and ensure a better experience for us all.

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